Have you heard of the new Series Engine? If not, you should check it out. It is a robust WordPress plugin that helps you organize and share sermons, lectures, audio, and other media content on your site and across the web. It was created by Eric Murrell, communications manager at Long Hollow Baptist Church, co-founder of MediaBLEEP, creator of The Prayer Engine and part of the Creative Missions vision team. I recently had the opportunity to ask him a few questions.
What is the Series Engine?
Eric Murrell: Series Engine is a premium sermon plugin for WordPress. It allows you to create a robust media page in seconds, and can share your messages throughout your site and across the web with unlimited media pages, podcasts and widgets.
What makes it different than the other sermon sharing services out there?
Eric: The Series Engine is capable of a lot of different things, but the standout feature for our customers seems to be the ease-of-use. It really does take only seconds to get started, and it only takes a few clicks to make it fit right in with just about any theme.
It’s also extremely flexible; I wanted to create a single product that stitched together a lot of the most-wanted features for any church site. Enter your sermon details once, and Series Engine uses that information to build media pages, flesh out your sidebars, update your podcasts and more. It gets rid of a lot of the busy work that drives ministries crazy.
What prompted you to create it?
Eric: Our church is switching to WordPress this fall, and I just couldn’t find a good solution for sharing sermons. Our media page is the most popular feature on our current site, and I didn’t want to take a step backwards in functionality just because we were switching platforms.
The Series Engine is the culmination of about eight months of hard work and late nights. It’s a solution that meets our needs in a unique way, and I think many other ministries will be able to benefit from it as well.
What problem does it solve for churches/organizations?
Eric: It provides a solution for sharing sermons with WordPress that is modern, attractive and easy-to-manage. There’s no longer a need to be chained to a specific church theme or try to shoehorn several other plugins together to make something work.
Series Engine is a simple, elegant (and cheap!) solution to a common problem for ministries.
What are some things churches should think through if they’re just getting started with providing their audio/video online?
Eric: First, your members and visitors are definitely looking for it. Visitors want it because they want to see what your church/pastor is like before they visit. Members want it so they can put their favorite messages on their iPod and share the messages that spoke to them with their friends.
More than anything, it helps your church to impact the community beyond just a Sunday morning service. Series Engine makes it easy to take a big step in the right direction.
Why did you decide to make it a WordPress plugin as opposed to a stand-alone solution?
Eric: In talking with churches and Prayer Engine customers over the last two years, there’s an obvious shift towards WordPress, especially in these financially challenging times. WordPress has grown a lot as a website platform, and its much more affordable to start up and maintain.
Since we’re moving to WordPress ourselves this fall, I figured it was the best place to start.
How easy is it to use?
Eric: Extremely easy. A user can install the plugin, create a media page, change the styles and upload their messages in just a few minutes (without ever touching a line of code).
How does it compliment it’s sister app, The Prayer Engine?
Eric: The two make for a pretty great combo. Our media and prayer pages are among the most popular features of our site, and these WordPress plugins provide every ministry with the same powerful tools.
We’ve had great feedback from the hundreds of churches using the Prayer Engine, so I’m hoping the Series Engine will be another huge help to ministries across the globe.
Series Engine for Free
Eric has been kind enough to give us a copy of the Series Engine to give away. If your church or organization has a WordPress blog and would like a copy, leave us a comment (and perhaps a tweet link to this post—though not required) with the following info:
Why your church needs Series Engine.Your church name and location.Make sure we have a way to contact you (i.e., put your real email address in the email field—it will remain private).
We’ll pick a winner in two weeks, on Wednesday, August 8 (so you better enter before then!).
And the winner is… Jon Stroker of Vista Community Church in Temple, Texas. Congrats!
Dan Kassis
July 25, 2012
Our church’s website runs on WordPress. We would love to have a tool like this to make sermon delivery easier and more robust. Our podcast attracts listeners from long distances away from our church. A tool like this would likely help us extend our ministry reach even further. Thanks to Eric for his generosity in this giveaway!
Paul Filipiak
July 25, 2012
We are a new church plant reaching out to 21,235 self-identified ‘unchurched’ souls in the neighborhood of Charlotte in the City of Rochester, NY. Our strategy involves videotaping our lead pastor (me) doing a weekly teaching and posting it up on our website to be viewed by our new found friends prior to coming to one of our community groups. We would also like to post video from interviews of people we meet on the streets to help get them onto our website. Your product appears to be a great fit for us and we would love to tweet our fingers raw ranting about how we leverage it to help build The Harbor. Or, we could just point people to our website and let Series Engine speak for itself.
Bottom line -got no money, got no shame, need your help to get in da game!
Jon Stroker
July 26, 2012
We are moving off of clover in the next month to build a more customizable system for our growing church. One element I have been struggling to figure out is how to have a nice and easy to operate system (like clover) to display our sermon videos. This seems to be a perfect solution. Our church, The Vista Community Church, meets in a gym each week in Temple, TX. Thanks for the giveaway Eric!
mark taylor
July 26, 2012
This is interesting, i have been talking to my local vicar about setting up wordpress site for our church, having spent time trying to find a way to do it i have just stumbled upon this page and bam the solution is right here.
David Escalante
July 26, 2012
Like Eric, I’ve been looking for a good media plugin solution, but haven’t been able to find something suitable. We are a church plant in Berkeley, CA and would love a copy of this!
Thanks for sharing guys!
Jeff LeMaster
July 26, 2012
Our current theme will only show one page of sermons, so this plugin would make available over five years of archived video and audio sermons with notes.
New Hope Community Church
Queensbury, NY
sharingnewhope.org
Matt Miller
July 26, 2012
I’m Matt Miller. I’m on staff with Life Church in Lancaster, PA. We are a brand new church (about 18 months old). In about a month we will be debuting our brand new WordPress site. You can view our, soon to be released, site here. http://www.lancaster-pa-church.com We’ve been wanting to integrate our sermons onto our new site but decided not to because we don’t have the knowledge/resources to do so at this point. This plugin would be a huge blessing to us. Thanks for your consideration! Twitter: @miller_matt
Steve Chavis
July 26, 2012
We have been using FIA to accomplish some of this on our site, but are always on the lookout for a more efficient and integrated solution. We want to be as lean as possible on the technical side so we can focus on our purpose. God Bless!
Katrina, Sunday School Craft Blogger
July 26, 2012
This is the first I’m hearing about Series Engine, and it looks like it’s something that I may want to check out for my church’s blog. Eric Murrell sounds like he knows what he’s talking about! I look forward to downloading Series Engine and using it soon. Thank you for taking the time to share this interview with your readers!
Kent Cox
July 27, 2012
this type of functionality would be awesome, and it would probably be the thing that motivated me to get my sermons on my blog in a more effective and efficient manner. My church would appreciate that, and they might actually stop by the blog for a view/listen every now and then.
Jeffery Peck
July 27, 2012
We are definitely in need of series engine… Its just what I’ve been looking for. We currently use tubepress to automatically embed our videos from vimeo, but it is messy and not very customizable.
Eagle’s Nest Church
Milton De
Jeffery
Rachael Camp
July 27, 2012
Fellowship Bible Church in Jackson, TN is in the process of converting to a WordPress site and Series Engine is the perfect solution for us to organize our sermon audio and video.
Julie Madden
July 28, 2012
Crossroads Baptist in Spartanburg, SC has been using WordPress for several years now. We have a limited budget and the website is managed by a volunteer (okay, me). We started offering our sermons online a few weeks ago. One sermon manager I tried was going to require a serious amount of styling and another I tried broke one of my plugins. I’m not letting it keep me from posting sermons online, but they are just sitting in a category with no real organization to them. We need Series Engine!!!
Nichelle Jones
July 29, 2012
I am Nichelle Jones, a leader at The WordChurch(TWC).We are bible teaching base church located in Houston, TX under the leadership of Pastor Carl Smith. I have been doing research about Series Engine for a while and I feel this is the step we need to bring souls to Christ via the internet. The bible says faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. We are in the business of allowing easy access for all to hear the great Gospel of Jesus Christ. I believe this tool will help us. We are a small church but with God we have a big vision. That vision is to take families to the next level through Gods word and audio is a vital part of the ministry and that vision. I feel this tool would be the perfect to equip Gods people with His word. I thank God for this opportunity.
Sincerely
Nichelle Jones
David Harrington
July 31, 2012
Like many of the others who’ve already posted comments, this is the first time I’ve heard of Series Engine. I have recently converted my church (Victory Baptist in Macon, GA) to WordPress because our prior site was very sad, and I’m looking for a plugin that will allow us to…well…to do exactly what series engine does. Honestly, we’re probably going to buy it anyways (but don’t let that stop you from giving us a copy :) ), because it looks like exactly what we’re looking for. Thank you, Chuck, for sharing this information, and thank you, Eric, for doing the giveaway.
Gregg Barbour
August 2, 2012
Hello,
I am the Worship & Arts Pastor at Elevation Christian Church in Aurora, CO. We have a website that uses wordpress, and we are a fairly new church (almost 2 years old). We are looking for creative marketing strategies and ways to reach our city. We’ve discovered that Denver is the 2nd most unchurched city in the nation, and marketing would really help us reach more people for Jesus. We are a church that directly targets unchurched people, and we hope to help them say “yes” to Jesus. We give people a chance to do that each week, and are seeing tremendous responses! We would appreciate your consideration for the free Series Engine plug in!
Stuart
June 3, 2013
Having read quite extensively around before making the plunge and purchasing this product, I wish you had asked for some details about after sales support in your interview. It’s rather frustrating to spend $100 on a product and receive zero support for it after the fact. Unfortunately, decent sermon plugins are so scarce that this one is probably the best of what is available, but it’s hardly ideal.
Kenneth Lee
July 23, 2014
I would love to see how this plugin works!
Joe
August 8, 2014
When updating an existing message, after clicking the UPDATE button I receive the error: Error 404 – page not found.
And then the update is not saved.
Using Enfold theme with WP 3.9.2
Kevin D. Hendricks
August 11, 2014
Joe, this is not a support forum for Series Engine. You’ll need to contact them directly. Thanks.
Matthew
February 3, 2015
This plugin looks just like what I need for my church website. Our old sermon system is slowly breaking, and today when I logged in I couldn’t listen to any of the sermons. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal until I realized the little to no sermon plugins that are for WordPress.
Matthew
February 3, 2015
I would love to have a copy of Series Engine!
JVC
February 25, 2016
I purchased this Series Engine and nothing is working right. The website says no phone support only email within 2 days response.
Paid $99.00 bucks and I only can get one video to play.
Went through the setup guide several times setup instructions seem straight forward went through troubleshooting page still nothing is working correctly.
I would not recommend this program.
Chuck Scoggins
March 4, 2016
@JVC
Sorry to hear you’re having trouble getting Series Engine to work correctly. I will say that whenever I’ve experienced any issue with it, it’s because of a conflict with another plugin (that was coded incorrectly) or a function that I created (using incorrect WordPress standards). In other words, any issues with it have always been resolved when I corrected something I have done wrong. Not implying that’s the case in your situation, just relaying my experience.
Also, I’ve sent tons of email support requests and they’ve always been quick to respond and have been very helpful.
I couldn’t recommend Series Engine (or their other products, Prayer Engine or Groups Engine) more!
Again, sorry that you’ve had a bad experience.